Micklethwait’s Balancing Act, After a Year as Bloomberg Editor in Chief

John Micklethwait, the editor in chief of Bloomberg, said he and Bloomberg’s founder, Michael Bloomberg, are aligned in their thinking about the company’s news offerings.Credit...Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg

In recent weeks, John Micklethwait, the editor in chief of Bloomberg, has sometimes felt, as he put it, like “a character in a Graham Greene novel. There’s an element of ‘there’s no perfect answer to it.’”

As part of a wide-ranging interview about his first year at Bloomberg, Mr. Micklethwait was discussing the latest in a line of complex balancing acts he has performed since he began running one of the world’s largest news organizations — in this case, how Bloomberg should cover its founder, Michael R. Bloomberg, as Mr. Bloomberg considers a presidential run.

At his previous job, as the top editor of The Economist, where he oversaw a staff of about 150, Mr. Micklethwait did not have to concern himself with such things. But his arrival at Bloomberg coincided with, among other changes, a broad refocusing within the organization’s newsroom.

Late last month, after it was reported that Mr. Bloomberg was seriously considering a bid for the White House, Bloomberg journalists received notice that they were to refrain from covering the news in depth. One memo, obtained by The New York Times, said that Mr. Micklethwait had “directed all of us across news to stick for now with our policy of not doing our own reporting on Mike. If there is a big news development, we can cite other media. We should not opine whatsoever on this topic. If we need to refer to it, because in the context of our other news coverage it would be absurd not to mention it, we can do so by citing other media reports on the subject.”

Days later, Kathy Kiely, a news director in Washington for Bloomberg, resigned, citing those restrictions as unacceptable. Mr. Micklethwait described that resignation as “a little odd,” given the company’s stated policy of not covering itself or its founder to avoid the appearance of bias. “If he did declare, then we would probably come up with a more formal set of things, and that’s something I’m looking at with our Washington people,” Mr. Micklethwait said.

Since finishing his tenure as mayor of New York City at the end of 2013, Mr. Bloomberg has returned to run the company that is the source of his personal fortune, which Forbes estimates at nearly $40 billion. Sweeping changes have followed.

At the end of 2014, it was announced that Matthew Winkler — who oversaw Bloomberg’s news operation as it became one of the largest in the world, with a staff of about 2,400 — would take an emeritus title and that Mr. Micklethwait would join the company. In addition, Daniel L. Doctoroff, the chief executive at Bloomberg who led a new media strategy and hired a number of people to execute it, said he would be leaving. Other important news staff members left in the weeks and months that followed.

And so a broad reconsideration of Bloomberg’s news and media offerings fell to Mr. Micklethwait, 53, a relative of the Duke of Norfolk and a descendant of William the Conqueror, the nobleman who led the Norman Conquest of Britain in 1066. (It is perhaps this heritage that led some in his newsroom to think, incorrectly, that he owned a castle in England.)

Mr. Micklethwait was educated at the Ampleforth College, an upscale English boarding school, and subsequently at the University of Oxford. He worked for Chase Manhattan Bank before switching to journalism and joining The Economist in 1987.

By 2006, he was editing The Economist, famed for lively and collegial discussions at its weekly meetings — discussions that form the basis for some of its distinctive articles.

If the World Economic Forum, held each year in Davos, Switzerland, decided to elect a mayor, the highly connected Mr. Micklethwait might be considered. He is also associated with the Bilderberg Group, a society that includes some of the world’s richest and most powerful people, including politicians, executives and financiers — precisely the people that Bloomberg News aims to reach — who gather annually to discuss global issues. “It’s a way to meet people,” Mr. Micklethwait said. (He could not remember precisely where or when he had met Mr. Bloomberg, but the two have known each other for several years.)

John Elkann, who leads the investment group Exor, which owns a stake in The Economist, described Mr. Micklethwait as “poised and calm,” with a gift for British understatement. He acknowledged that The Economist was a very different organization from Bloomberg News, but he said that in Mr. Micklethwait, Mr. Bloomberg had a leader who could push the news organization’s global growth.

Though Mr. Bloomberg has a reputation for concerning himself with details as small as the on-air gestures of Bloomberg’s television presenters and how the paper towel dispensers in the company’s offices are labeled, Mr. Micklethwait said he had no difficulties with his boss.

The two are aligned in their thinking about the company’s news offerings, he said, adding that Mr. Bloomberg generally doesn’t make any journalistic decisions. They disagree from time to time, he said, but in that case they “come to an arrangement.” Mr. Micklethwait declined to cite specific examples.

A recent memo Mr. Micklethwait sent to his staff outlined a long list of new endeavors, and achievements, including an opinion site, Gadfly, and a morning news service, Daybreak. And most of the efforts focus on the six areas at which he has said the company’s reporting should be aimed: business, finance, markets, economics, technology and power (political and governmental).

But some Bloomberg staff members are concerned with the company’s new direction, which they fear could mean a retreat from pursuing ambitious journalism. It is hard, they have suggested, to afflict the comfortable when some of those same people are paying more than $20,000 annually to subscribe to Bloomberg’s financial information terminals — a computer system that provides users with data — especially when those terminals account for about 80 percent of Bloomberg’s annual revenue of about $9 billion.

Mr. Micklethwait denied that Bloomberg had cut back on investigative reporting. But he said it was true that the organization had refocused, a process that seemed to have resolved a tension between those who saw it as a media company with bold ambitions fueled by the terminals’ profits, and those who saw it as a more measured media company in the service of those terminals.

Last fall, Bloomberg’s media group produced a graphic to clarify how it interpreted its customer base. It looks like the cross-section of a planet. The large, gray core is “Terminal Customers.” Around it are thinner layers that represent audiences of “Global Finance Professionals” and “Global Business Professionals.” More general audiences are not mentioned.

Mr. Micklethwait disagreed that his newsroom had become more reflexively establishmentarian. Bloomberg, he said, is a kind of “parish magazine of finance. And when we say this hedge fund is messed up this way or this bank has done this thing wrong, that particular banker may not particularly love us at that moment, but the rest of finance wants to know about it. And that I think is key.”

The tension has been particularly acute in its reporting on China, which represents a vast potential market for Bloomberg but is also strictly controlled by an authoritarian government that has punished journalists and news organizations that have displeased the country’s leaders.

In June 2012, Bloomberg, which had hired a decorated group of investigative journalists to cover China, published a series of articles on the family wealth of Chinese leaders, including Xi Jinping, who at that time was the incoming Communist Party chief and is now the country’s president. After publication, government officials ordered state enterprises not to subscribe to the service.

Several Bloomberg employees, including some who still work there, subsequently accused the organization of shying away from similar reporting in the aftermath. Some of the investigative staff members resigned.

Mr. Micklethwait said that though he was not at Bloomberg when the issue arose, there was not currently a policy to cover China less aggressively. The company has continued to report there, he said. “But let me just be clear on one thing,” Mr. Micklethwait said. “Our license within China is just to be a business and finance wire.”